Look at what the public or social sector in any major city is doing to leverage new technologies and you’re likely to find an abundance of unfinished and unused civic applications. Such graveyards of software applications are an unfortunate byproduct of of the app contests and hackathons that forward-thinking cities like to promote. Latin America has as many as any other part of the world, but it also has the Desarrollando America Latina (DAL) network. DAL is experimenting with new models for generating technology solutions to social problems. Efforts in other parts of the world - from New York to Nairobi - should study their lessons learned.

Last week, Buenos Aires' Open Government launched an interactive timeline of its 100-year-old subway sytem (Credit: Screenshot)

In only a few years, the government, civil society and media in Buenos Aires have actively embraced open data. The Buenos Aires city government has been publishing data under a creative commons license and encouraging civic innovation through hackathons. NGOs have launched a number of tech-driven tools and Argentina's second largest newspaper, La Nación, has published several hard-hitting data journalism projects. The result is a fledgling but flourishing open data culture in Buenos Aires, in a country that has not yet adopted a freedom of information law. Read More

A number of digital health tools have emerged of late, from Google Flu and now a mega data collecting platform called BioMosaic. Can these new technologies really help us predict outbreaks and prevent their spread? Read More

The hackathon model is being reimagined so that it’s less focused on discrete time-frames, ticking clocks and prize money, to more focused on building lasting communities across sectors, using physical spaces like innovation hubs, event series and virtual conversations. As these recent experiences suggest, replacing the traditional hackathon model with one that’s based on a continuous conversation promises three key advantages. Read More

Look closely at any recent wave of street protests and you’re likely to find a group of “civic technologists” trying to find news ways for citizens to participate in the public sector. These are the type of people that came together last week in Uruguay for Latin America’s first “unconference” on open government. Roughly 60 civic technologists talked for two days about their shared challenges and emerging best practices in using technology to engage citizens. Read More

This week, technologists, researchers, activists and public officials will meet up in Montevideo, Uruguay to talk about government transparency. To kick off the festivities, two leading open government not for profits in the region, Uruguay’s DATA and Chile’s Ciudadano Inteligente, are holding an unconference on open data called Abre Latam (Open Latam). The unconference is primarily focused on convening civil society, and is intended to complement the more government-oriented event, a regional conference on open data, that starts on Wednesday. Read More

Coursera and the World Bank have teamed up in Tanzania to use MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course) to teach students market-relevant IT skills and reduce the gap between job openings and skilled workers. A World Bank blog explains employers in Tanzania complain too many jobs go unfilled because job seekers lack the specific, necessary skills, especially in IT and ICT. The World Bank thinks Coursera could play an important part in a new and improved education system.

Longtime Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have passed away earlier this month, but that won’t silence his voice on social media. Chavez’s official Twitter account, from which he last tweeted to 4 million-plus followers in February as he entered the hospital, will be reactivated as a platform for the leader’s thoughts and works, as state media announced last week. Yet recent reports of social media censorship – including a woman whose computer was confiscated by the police – confirm that, in the aftermath of Chavez’s death, Venezuela is taking a hard line on online discourse.